Standartization and TeX
I apologize for being so prolific writer on this list. Still, I'd like
to clear an important point.
When we talked about LaTeX being both a program and a language
standard, some Debian people told us that this situation is the same
as with Perl, Python, Ruby etc. I think there is a big difference
here.
Texts in Perl, Python, etc. are computer programs. The useful age of
such texts is short. If my current program in Perl-6 will not compile
in Perl-210 sometime in 2100, it will not matter: this program will be
obsolete at that time. The maintainers of the languages do support
backward compatibility, but usually for a couple of versions
only. Nobody guarantees it for anything decades old.
Our documents are books, papers, etc. We want these texts to last much
longer than computer programs -- ideally, forever. Libraries use
acid-free paper for this. We use a format that is not going to
change. That is the goal of TeX and LaTeX.
Documents in Microsoft Word last only until the company behind them
decides to make a format change and milk the customers for a new
version of their software. The fact that your decade old LaTeX paper
is as good as new, while a Word document in several years might be
unreadable, is a good argument against closed formats and proprietary
software; I am surprised that Debian people are going to sacrifice
it.
There are tens of thousands of such texts in e-print archives -- Math
papers, Physics papers, etc. Meddling with LaTeX might threat these
documents. Can we afford this? Again, I am not speaking of a backward
compativbility for the version of yesterday; I am speaking about
perpetual storage.
The state of HTML is a good ilustration of this point. Old documents
prepared for Mosaic certianly look different in Mozilla. Some aborted
code like MathHTML proposal lead to documents that are NOT rendered in
the current browsers. We do not want this state of affairs in our
documents.
However, I agree with David Carlisle, that this discussion is
moot. The present LPPL conforms to the present DFSG. If Debian people
are going to change the guidelines, they must realize that this will
render unacceptable not only LaTeX, but also a good part of other
software, *including* some parts essential for GNU systems like
texinfo.
--
Good luck
-Boris
It's easy to get on the internet and forget you have a life
-- Topic on #LinuxGER
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